


The Broken Places Are Where The Light Gets In

by Stationmaster_Eule_1987



Category: MCU
Genre: Character resurrections, Cussing, F/F, F/M, Found Family, Gen, I'm filling in, I'm not fixing, M/M, Multi, Not an AU but a long-running explanation, Okay maybe I'm fixing some things, Other, People talk to each other in this one, Plot demons being what they are, Probably violence but idk when or why, Screw you Russo brothers, Sex (eventually), Therapy, Working within Canon, fair warning, friends - Freeform, like a lot, this is gonna be a long one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-13 04:03:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21488032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stationmaster_Eule_1987/pseuds/Stationmaster_Eule_1987
Summary: Basically it's Avengers: The Therapy Sessions, like we all wanted.  Character interactions and conversations.  Dialogue-heavy AF.  I'm not deleting or altering much of anything in the established MCU canon, but I may work in some logical fixes and address some plot holes.  Fair warning, I love Cap like nobody's business, but I am a Tony stan first and foremost.  We don't pit Gucci against Gucci in my house.
Relationships: Actual Friendships, IronStrange - Relationship, Ironhusbands - Relationship, Polyam - Relationship, Stucky, pepperony
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a Hemingway quote.

“So. I guess we’ve finally hit the end of the line, huh, pal?”  
Without Sam or Banner there to buffer it, his voice dipped toward Winter. Sense consciousness told him they had retreated to the cabin and stood watching from the porch. Witnesses, but not judges. He could speak, or act, and they wouldn’t move to stop him.  
He wasn’t sure if he could call that trust, resignation, or fatal naivety.  
Steve gazed at him, oddly measuring. He patted the bench, his ring gleaming, and wouldn’t break eye contact until Bucky surrendered and sat with him. The gentle old hand that curled around his made him gulp. Strong—even after so long, Steve had power beyond normal men—but powder-soft, spotted, veined. Alien. It gave him chills like the precursor to puking.  
Steve squeezed, and when that failed he pulled Bucky’s resistant hand to his lap and held it like a sparrow. “What’s on your mind, Buck?”  
The slide of a knife, the thrust and tear of forceps fumbling after a bullet. Memories of physical torment were the only analog he could find for his emotions right now. That fucking ring glinted in his eyes like laughter.  
“You left me. For her.” He clenched, metal hand grinding, still hidden in his pocket where he’d kept it through the funeral so no one would have to pretend they weren’t staring at it. “Just like I knew you would.”  
He winced, guilt and surprise arching through him. “Is that how it reads? Aw, damn, Buck. I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that.” Again that pensive stare, that strange reserve. “Figured I’d be back before you knew I was gone.”  
“It’s not about me being without you. It’s about you, being okay with being without me.”  
“You thought I left you for good, buddy?”  
“Kinda looks that way, doesn’t it?”  
“Does it?”  
Bucky frowned, bewildered. It wasn’t like him to play word games, or sit stalwart while anyone looked at him in this much pain. The betrayal and loss ran deep, twining and twisting like old roots, and the fact that Steve was here, now, back like he said he would be, touched but few of them. Even so, it was impossible to articulate 'doubt' in Steve, even to himself. He remembered the plan, but this hadn’t been part of it. It didn’t make sense.  
It didn’t make any _sense_.  
And then it did.  
“You’re not…my Steve at all, are you?”  
His eyes sparkled, his soft old mouth thinned in a devious smile. “He said it wouldn’t take you very long.”  
Bucky stared at him. A kernel—less than a kernel, a mote—of hope started to burn deep inside. His heart raced. “You’re serious?”  
“Do you really think, after everything you two went through, he could just walk away from you like that? You really put yourself down that hard, Buck?”  
“I didn’t…”  
“I know. He explained it.” He drew a battered leather notebook from an inner pocket. Rifling the pages, Bucky recognized Steve’s slanting script, his art, his tearstains. “I didn’t understand most of it, but I remembered it. The last few years have put some pieces together.”  
“Where…” He cleared his throat, holding that hand like an anchor. “Where is he?”  
He sighed. “Things went wrong,” he said. “Like things always seem to. He’s out trying to fix it. Fishing me out of the drink was the last thing he did before he went off to take care of it, so he told me to tell you: The Stones have to be brought back, or everything is doomed. Still don’t altogether know what that means, but he said you would.” He tapped the journal, nudging it into his hand so he knew it was for him to keep. “There’s a letter in the back, for you. I never got into it.”  
Bucky nodded. Looking into those eyes, he believed. He knew they’d never seen him before—not this him, not in this life. The pain evaporated, and he found himself smiling. Off saving the universe again; he could tolerate that, as an excuse for being late. Steve might still get an earful when he finally got back, of course. But he might not.  
“And you?” he asked. “He just…hauled you out of the ocean and sent you home?”  
He smirked. “Slapped me around a little first. Called me an idiot. I think there might have been some issues in there.” He shrugged, clearly more capable of forgiving his alternate than any Steve was of forgiving himself. His smiled warmed, nostalgia and peace shining from him. Bucky determined in that instant that no matter what he had to do, his Steve would smile like that someday.  
“I had my life with Peggy. And it was _beautiful_. He gave me that. We built a damn fine world together, from all the warnings he left us. But… Peg’s gone now. The kids are grown, the grandkids are grown. They don’t need me in their lives anymore. It was the right time to finish what he left for me to do. I came over a few years back, jumped from my time to yours with the doodad he left me. Figured if you want me to, I could stick around a while.”  
A question burned on the tip of his tongue, a terror, a hope, too sacrilegious and beautiful to voice. Steve shifted closer on the bench, arm against his, and nodded slowly.  
“I got you back,” he murmured. “Peggy and me, the Howlies. We found you, Buck. You never went through…as much as you did. Life was good.”  
He wept on Steve’s shoulder until the sun passed behind the woods.  
The lights of the cabin behind them cast a glimmer on the lake, but the evening darkened around them like an embrace, and neither felt any need to break it. There were things he could ask, conversations they could hold about his life, about Peggy, his children. But those things could wait. For now, Bucky took what was offered. Comfort. Wholeness. A love that began with someone else, rooted in some other life, but that Steve shared freely, as one can love the brother of a friend before ever meeting him.  
“I never thought I’d get to see you old,” he whispered.  
Steve smiled against his temple, and the tender old skin didn’t upset him one bit. “One of these days, you’ll get to watch it in real time.”


	2. Chapter 2

Cyan. Ultramarine. Indigo. Ice-white. The hues of a madman’s summer sky whirled, congealed, brightened, and tore. A metal-strapped boot crunched in the snow. The portal closed. Confident—but he was always confident, wasn’t he—Loki Odinson marched up the side of the mountain, summoning a path before him and erasing it from the stone and ice after he passed.  
The chamber at the top of the mountain was not warm. Warmth was a foreign concept here. No hearth blazed, no torch flickered on the swooping curls of the icy walls. But it was shielded from the wind, and that could be counted. No attendants hovered at the doors, no guards backed the massive chair for pomp and vanity, no tables laden with delicacies nor triumphant banners of the vanquished softened the hollow. It was a cave, and remained a cave.  
For all that, a throne room it also remained, and that throne stood occupied.  
“Did Thanos believe it?” Loki asked from above.  
“He did,” Loki replied from below.  
Sitting forward into the starlight shimmering from the open roof, Loki steepled his long fingers. No relief showed in his angular face, no victory, nor even smugness for another successful deceit. He sat pensive, the future already spooling through his mind. This first feint, this frantic claw for breathing room, ultimately counted for nothing in the long campaign ahead.  
“So did Thor,” the Loki below went on. He picked at a thumbnail, the break in eye contact with himself freighted with meaning. Always at his most dismissive when he felt the most deeply. The Loki enthroned narrowed his eyes.  
“He had to,” he retorted. Rising, frost manifesting on his cape and swirling as delicate flakes in his wake, he stalked the dais. “Thor is many things, but a talented liar is not among them. If he had the first idea something was going on other than strictly what he saw and heard, it would all come undone.”  
“He screamed.”  
Rooted to the floor, turned to stone as surely as the stalagmites holding up his roof, he glared sidelong at his clone. The scout, the trickster, the decoy. The sacrifice. Loki had never expended so much magic to manifest a clone before. It had to be absolute, the most convincing illusion of all time. Solid to the touch, ripe with blood and breath, and now, it seemed, thinking for himself. A gossamer wisp connected them, a single silken thread of magic and life that allowed the broken corpse to revive once Thanos and his minions departed, but not enough to be detected. The welts of Thanos’ killing grip rode high on his pale throat.  
“He begged for us,” he went on. “Begged Thanos, on his knees, to spare us. Surrendered the Stone for us. Heimdall is dead. Asgard is dead. Father and Mother, dead. Our sister whom we never knew, dead. _Everything is dead_.”  
“I live.”  
“You hide.”  
“I plan!” he shouted. The mountain trembled. His clone did not. “All of this will be for nothing if we don’t hold the course! Without Thor, they’re doomed. We are all doomed.”  
“Maybe if you stood beside him for once, _he_ wouldn’t be.”  
He spun, fist upraised, ripping the magic out of him, unraveling the patience, the beauty, the craft that had gone into building him. Unmaking his child. The clone never cried out. He stood defiant in his agony, shredded apart as if by crows, and the last of him to surrender were his hate-filled eyes as he gazed up at himself.  
Shuddering, the only remaining Loki stood at his throne, gazing at frozen basalt, seeing, feeling, all that his clone had experienced from Sakaar onward. Parties, freedom, friendship. The fearful bliss of suborning himself to a will more powerful than his own. Death and war, deceit and horror, grief for a father he could barely tolerate and now would miss like a severed limb. Gurgling on shards of his own shattered windpipe as Thanos gazed at him like an insect, the indifference of the god he claimed to be and could not be allowed to become.  
He let it all fall away. He had died in Thanos’ grasp many times, in many more inventive ways than strangulation. His time on Sakaar had been productive, but ultimately held no further value. The swell of loathing toward himself, his machinations, was also familiar. He dismissed it, if not with ease, then with practice.  
His breath did not steam as he drew himself up. He stretched long fingers, artist’s fingers, deft and ungloved in the cold of a world that slaughtered gods without so much as noticing them. The fur on his collar was for style, not protection. His cape, the same. His armor was quite functional, however.  
He had all he needed. The clone was extraneous, the magic reabsorbed. The chance at companionship, understanding, a splitting of the burden, a distraction better removed.  
Sweeping his cape, reaching into himself for the power he had absorbed long ago, tickling the pattern of Space to feel it respond like a purring pet, he settled. He returned to his throne. He could wait; the proper moment would arrive, and he would know it. The peace of a viper; the readiness of a snow-deep mountain to slough and careen and obliterate. He reached out, part of his realm in every crevasse, every pebble, every exquisite star in the untroubled sky—even as it was part of him, in the skin that deepened to blue, the eyes that came alight in the only crimson flame desolate Jotunheim had ever known.  
Silence, but for the wail of a far-distant wind through the crags.  
Darkness unrivaled, the oblivion of a world with no native star.  
Cold beyond feeling, beyond reasoning, the torpor of atoms.  
In the endless night of immortal winter, his army seethed.  
Prince of his realm, King on his throne, Loki, Laufeyson, whispered, and every ear turned.  
“_Soon_.”


End file.
